


The Coil

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [27]
Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: 30Fic, Angst, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Pining, Time Travel, one-sided Will/Bran
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-04 17:45:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12173706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: On the eve of his 30th birthday, Will goes for a walk.(Standalone story, see notes for series explanation.)





	The Coil

**Author's Note:**

> The Thirty Fic series is my long-term ongoing project of writing stories about characters turning or being thirty. The stories aren't related except by that one common thread.
> 
> Content notes: uh, moral inaction? Depiction of a not-great situation mental-health-wise?

On the eve of his 30th birthday, Will Stanton does his filing as usual.

It's always a bit slow around the holidays - business will pick up again in January - so he empties his tray twice between deliveries of more work. He sends various files to various internal destinations with appropriate notes and writes one suitably formal cover letter for some outgoing correspondence. At quarter to five, when the typewriters and xerox have fallen silent, and the office is instead alive with chatter about perhaps going round to the pub for a drink, Will looks out the window. No snow - it never snows for his birthday any more.

He closes his last file, takes his overcoat down from the coat stand, and says goodnight to Patricia by the door.

It's cold, but not bitter, damp, but not coming down, so he opts as he usually does to skip the Tube and walk back to his flat. Straight home, for once, he tells himself. The streets near the office are full of similar home-goers, stopping in and out for a drink or a curry or a bit of last-minute Christmas shopping, and he dodges shoulders with well-practiced ease.

He should go straight home, he thinks. His mother will call tonight, and perhaps Stephen, or Paul; he should be there to answer the telephone. But it's easy to fall into a rhythm, walking, passing through pools of light around the street lamps and fringes of shadow between, and so he keeps walking, until he looks around and knows he should have turned some time back.

There's a small blue-green stone in his pocket, and he rubs it with his fingertips as he walks. He isn't wearing gloves.

_In the morning, I'll give notice,_ he thinks. _Enough of this_. The work he does is inane, pointless, in another ten years computers will replace half his company and their endless circulation of paper. He's been there for years without promotion or change in his duties, and the work has never been interesting, not from the very beginning. If it was, if it could be even a little more absorbing, if it could distract him... but he is never able to forget what he is, not for even part of a day.

_If I could work outside, that might help_ , he thinks, passing a tiny garden square, where a single tree presides over a rectangle of grass and a strip of bushes. He pictures Dawsons' Farm, and then, of course, Clwyd and the sheep and the mountain slopes, which he knows is what he really meant from the start.

He looks around, like someone might have somehow noticed what he was thinking, but of course no one on the sidewalk is paying attention to him in the slightest. It's pretty much universal across time, at least in London: if he's quiet and not in anyone's way, no one notices him at all.

He could still go home tonight. He wouldn't, technically, even need to backtrack - just as all times coexist, the streets of London run easily into each other. Simple enough to turn a corner and be on his own street. He's not even sure he hasn't already shifted places like that tonight - everything around him looks familiar, but are these shops really so close to that church behind him? Weren't there terraced houses west of that square?

Or maybe last time he came this way, he skipped around, and this time he's walking straight. Going out so many nights, for so many years, it starts to blur together.

It's not really any darker than it already was when he left the office, but it feels colder. Scarves are pulled higher on necks, coats seem more tightly wrapped. He can feel the cold, but it feels a little removed, and easy to ignore, although that could just as well be true from the exertion of walking.

Or it might be the different weather of a different night. That happens too. Continuity in time is just as dispensable for him as linearity in space.

There's a newsstand in the next block, which he passes at the same steady pace he's been maintaining. He could check the date, but he doesn't want to. He can't help but catch a few headlines - they're familiar, current, they place him in his own winter, not far from his impending birthday. Bombings, disasters, a hole in the ozone above the Antarctic.

Will has never been to Antarctica, not outside of the Book of Gramarye, but it's easy to imagine soaring over it, tasting for the ozone up even higher. He can feel the shape of the giant petrel he could take, and name the spells of the air that could reach above the clouds and heal where the sky is unraveling.

And the places where peace unravels too...

He shakes his head. He's still been walking all this time, and he's come to the bank of the Thames; he looks across it, to all the buildings on the other side.

Merriman had said that it was up to men now; human responsibility only, to light the world, to keep it alive. He had called him "Will the watchman". He's supposed to keep his distance, he thinks, like the whole world is on that far shore - to observe, only, and not interfere.

Or maybe Merriman had meant that the time for magic was done, but that Will could act as any other person - strategize, persuade with his words, speak advice to the people in power. Maybe write about history, he thinks, and how the cycles repeat; he thinks people would listen. He could help people make plans that would change things.

He can feel himself walking faster, his heart beating harder with urgency. He could _do something_ , he knows he could, and wouldn't Merriman want that? When he sees him again someday, outside of Time, wouldn't it be better to say he did something, than nothing?

He notices that the boats have changed first; looks over and the Thames is all oars and lanterns. He looks away, but he can hear how the shoes of passers-by make a different sound now on the stones. The smell hits him next; he always thinks that should be the first thing he notices, but it never is...

There's something about moving through time that's soothing, like the minutes that he walks, uncoupled from the night that he left, don't have to count against him. He can feel himself slowing down again, back to his regular, even pace. He turns away from the river and relaxes all the way into it, letting go of his hold on any particular time: now his steps can move him seasons. Or eras.

The buildings turn from stone to wood and brick, to half-timbering, wattle and daub, and older, earlier stone. Jettied top floors lurch out and in. Sometimes a time will catch and hold around him, while he notices a window box of flowers, or an organ grinder; he perspires in his coat, finding himself in warmer nights.

The first time he walked like this through time, he was trying to keep himself in London. He was fighting a growing habit of finding himself too far west, too far out of London. Dangerous to think where that might lead, and so he had set himself the project of going steadily backwards through time, along a contiguous physical path, like he was driving the streets in a time machine.

Now he lets himself jump around, following little coincidences (the smell of the same formulation of sausages frying, the same song carrying out of the alehouses) as much as chronology or space. He's better at not letting himself wander. So he finds himself for a few paces across the river, and then back; for a few moments in Londinium, in Lundenwic, in Lundenburh.

It is always night, in any time he walks through. He always gets tired, and hungry, but he never stops in the alehouses or coffeehouses. He tries not to take, or touch, or alter. His clothes should mark him, but his coat is a cloak whenever it needs to be. That's as automatic to him now as one foot in front of the other.

Another Old One would recognize him, but there are no Old Ones left in Time; very occasionally, a shadow, where one of his kind had once been. He has sometimes wondered if he might run into _himself_ , out walking into the same past from some future night, but he considers it hopeful that he hasn't: maybe the lack of future Wills crossing his path means that he will finally keep one of his promises to himself to stop doing this. Or maybe it just means that there are enough nights and enough streets that it will take him a long, long time to walk through them all. 

_But I won't_ , he tells himself. _This is the last night and I'm going to stop and tomorrow I will start something real._ His life has changed on his birthday before. It's fitting. He'll buy himself a typewriter, and start making notes for one of those essays he keeps thinking about. He'll head for a war zone, to see what he can do. He'll call Bran to see if he'd like to offer him many happy returns...

Some fleck of something lands on his sleeve, and he looks up, puzzled. The streets are narrow around him just now, and for a moment he thinks there is snow drifting down between the jutting buildings, but this night is too warm for winter. It's not snow, it's ash.

With this realization comes an awareness of the unusual number of people around him on the street, carrying sacks and parcels, and he knows when he must be. This London is on fire, the Great Fire, and these people are fleeing. They're too crowded around him, now, making him stumble - in another heartbeat he's on a different street, emptier, where buildings are actively catching flame, and the whole sky is a hellish, threatening orange.

The few people here are moving faster, running, and one woman, seeing that he isn't running with them, comes right up to him.

"My Annie," she says, grabbing on to his arm, "My Annie, she is still in there - "

He knows the spells of fire, of course. He could walk safely into whichever burning home is her "in there", and carry out her Annie. But it's not his place to interfere, to change the past, unless he already has, unless he always already saved her... but there is no way to know...

Sick and unsure, he pulls away, and takes another faltering step, and then he's somewhere else again, where ash and cinders are cold under a smoke-choked sky. He shudders, and keeps walking, until undevastated London is back around him.

He tries to stay out of battles, away from famous dates. No massacres, no riots, no Blitz. The task of the Light was to oppose the Dark, not to run around making rescues. The loss of individual lives was part of the pattern of Time. Sometimes he thinks Merriman could never blame him for kindness to strangers. Or maybe he would be gently disappointed. Or stern and unforgiving, who knows? The Old Ones had always existed as a circle, with a purpose. Will is the only one to face this test.

The unavoidable next question is what makes the 20th century any different than the ones before. If anything, he has less excuse to want to help. The Dark is banished from Time now, but at least it had been there, in the invasions and massacres. The Light had worked to resist it and so Will, if he worked in the past, could claim to still be part of that mission. But Bran had cut the Dark out of the future forever. What right can Will have to change what is going to happen, when he alone isn't bound to the world?

_Bran would have an answer_ , he thinks. Bran's judgment would be different than Merriman's, it could say, "what next", not just "what was". Bran had never had Gramarye or the circle. Bran could help him thread the path between usurper and useless fossil.

Of course, if Will were with Bran, he wouldn't have to ask what he was supposed to do. He would be Bran's shield and his torch. Simple.

Hyde Park is suddenly dark and leafless to his left, at least he thinks it's Hyde Park. Some fall or winter night, some time. He doesn't try to guess when. There is no time when he can go to Bran.

He's never been quite sure how it was supposed to work. If Bran hadn't chosen the way he did, he would have gone with Arthur. Having chosen, he has lost all real understanding of Will. No role for Will in either of those lives. And yet Will knows in his bones that he is Bran's wizard, as much as Merriman was Arthur's... how can he have been made this way, if Bran would never need him?

He looks down at his feet and realizes he's walking on dirt. There are trees on both sides of him now - Hyde Park was a bad influence, he's losing his grip on the city and drifting out into the countryside again, or what was countryside, at some point. He focuses a little and his next steps take him alongside a car park. Better. Maybe. The night he's in now feels like summer, and he opens his coat and then slips his hand back into his pocket, worrying at the blue-green stone.

He has no idea what he would have said, if Bran had said yes to Arthur, and Merriman had said, come with us. He can't imagine how it would have hurt his family if they had believed he had died at twelve. And he is still human enough that it hurts him to think of them forgetting him instead. When Merriman does finally call him, he hopes he gets a chance to see them all one last time.

A streetlight, and trees. More trees, and no streetlight.

Everything had felt so obvious when he was twelve. There was the great work of the Light, and he enacted his role in it. He knelt to Arthur when he met Arthur and knew he would someday kneel to Bran. Even after Merriman left, it had been okay, for a little while, remembering while the rest of them forgot. He could forget too, for months or even years at a time. But leaving school had jarred something loose, like he couldn't expect to just wait around any more, and after that the memories never would pack away again. They made less sense without that deep constitutive sense of necessity. Bran's choice ruptured... something... but what would it have been? And if it was the right choice for the world, like Merriman had said, then where does that leave Will?

Hedgerows to either side of him. Countryside again, and a million stars in the night above him. Deep ruts in the road below, he'll have to watch his step.

Sometimes he tries to tell himself there's a possibility with Bran even though he can't remember what he had been and what Will still is. Merriman had said to John Rowlands that all love had value, even love for someone who hadn't been at all what he thought. Will can imagine a life where he isn't Bran's wizard, just his friend, where they farm sheep and walk in the hills together and Bran argues with him fierce-eyed over things that don't matter at all. Will would make time to eat, if they shared a kitchen. If they shared a bed, he thinks he could sleep.

Merriman would have something to say about that, Will's sure. Something like "he was not for you", or "you were not granted your stay in Time for this". Merriman might have been sympathetic to John Rowlands believing in a lie but he would have no mercy for Will lying.

Bran isn't even on the farm any more, anyways, he's in Aberystwyth at the University, and if Will has reason to think he might once have been amenable to the more intimate parts of this daydream - the last time they saw each other, there was more than a bit of staring at each other's mouths and hands and such - that was years ago. 

(Bran had caught him fiddling with the blue-green stone. Feelings had rushed into Will like a great wave of water - would it seem familiar, _could_ Bran remember something - but Bran had just said "that's pretty" and left Will standing there with his memories of Bran holding Eirias, and a whirlpool-like need to be of service to him, swirling and violent and hollow at the center.)

Will keeps walking, while he remembers this. Snow-covered fields; dark, sleeping pastures; oats, wheat, beans. He is far outside of London now. The farmlands don't change as much as the city, as he steps into and out of the years. If he's in Buckinghamshire now, as he well might be, it's strange to think that somewhere around here there was, or will be, a night when his mother is in labor. There's a night when a boy who doesn't know what he is yet is menaced by rooks.

Will walks away from winters, thinking about that, back into early falls, late summers, fields that might be harvested the next morning. There was a summer day near here too, the most important day of all, but it was a day and not a night, and he never walks into daytimes.

Leaves under his feet. Autumns again. He's walking along a paved road, under a dark, cloudy sky, and then suddenly the moon comes out, bright and full. No, it's a different night, and the road he walks on now is gravel, weirdly studded with white pebbles, so white and round they almost glow.

He walks a few more steps, and then he realizes the pebbles are moving. He squats down to look, and they're not pebbles at all: they're snails, hundreds of snails, moving down the road together in some mysterious pilgrimage.

_...sage Snayl, within thine own self curl'd..._ , he remembers from the Book of Gramarye. The most independent of creatures, carrying its own house. The one he's watching waves its eyestalks gently and leaves a silvery trail as it makes its slow way over the gravel. Its spiral shell seems very beautiful in the moonlight.

He's so caught up in watching it that he doesn't hear the footsteps approaching until someone clears their throat.

"Farmwife this way would give you some bread," the man says, and Will startles and looks up and almost falls back onto his backside. He knows this man. It's the Walker. It's Hawkin.

"I've been hungry enough to look at those like that," the Walker says. "Some times people are kinder than others." He sighs heavily. Will can't tell, looking at him, how many years he has seen, yet.

"You a deserter?" the Walker asks. "Don't fear, it's all the same to me. Even if you're a spy for Bonyparty, looking for a taste of home, I guess." He snorts a little, and Will realizes that he has no idea who Will is. The Will that Hawkin met was an eleven-year-old boy, and the Will to whom the Walker must give the Sign is an eleven-year-old boy, and perhaps his mind is not clear enough, this night, to recognize Will, grown, as an Old One.

"I'm not hungry," Will says, standing up, although his stomach is empty. He's not hungry in the way that the Walker means, where he would spot these snails and see a meal.

The Walker looks at him suspiciously. "You're trying to trick me then," he says. "Shouldn't be here. Lying in wait."

"I'm just out for a walk," Will says. Their eyes meet, and Will can see something break through the Walker's assumptions. Some awareness of Will as a fellow man out of time, maybe.

"Hmph," the Walker says, and kicks at one of the snails, and then turns and darts away, back the way he had come.

Will kneels down again. The snail the Walker kicked is upside-down and retracted into its shell, but the shell appears intact. Will sets it down on its foot, facing the way it was going, and watches until it cautiously extends itself again.

"There you go," Will says softly. The snails, at least, don't seem to have any doubts in their direction. He supposes their whole nature is like that: from the very first curve of their shells, the spiral is determined, and no matter how long they keep growing, the proportions will hold.

Being an Old One had been like that once, predestined and inevitable. He doesn't understand. _He_ never betrayed Merriman, how can he have ended up like Hawkin? Serving an absent master, wondering when he will discharge his final duty, always walking...

The snails are making him sad, they're so at home within themselves. He stands and takes a few more steps, west and north and west, but they're slow, and his feet feel heavy, and he stops in a rainy winter before his shoes are all over mud.

If he kept going, eventually he would come to mountains. If he crossed them, he would come to Bran. He doesn't know whether walking is a way to test himself, or pretend it might be possible, or just a way to fill time and get through the nights.

He doesn't wear a watch, so it doesn't really matter how long he's been walking. Even his tiredest steps can still cross miles and years. If he turns around, he can walk right into the morning of his birthday back in London. Maybe early enough that he can sleep for an hour, fry sausages, check the telephone answering machine.

It will be his birthday, and he'll go to work and do his filing as usual, and then he'll walk, holding the stone in his pocket, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his time in Time.

**Author's Note:**

> A note about time. I have set this in the vague late 1980s - if you take _Over Sea, Under Stone_ as happening in the summer of 1965 when it's published, Will's 11th birthday is that December, and thus he turns 30 in '84. If you go purely by in-canon dates, Miss Greythorne's Christmas party in _Dark Is Rising_ is in 1875 and Will's 11th birthday (and the summer when he's 12) have to be less than 100 years later because of the Sign of Wood, and he would turn 30 in '91 at the latest. I wanted to avoid being too specific about bombings and war zones.
> 
> A note about poems. In keeping with how Susan Cooper did it in _Dark Is Rising_ , the line Will quotes from the Book of Gramarye is actually a line from a poem, in this case [Richard Lovelace's "The Snayl"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44655/the-snail). Although not quoted directly, [William Cowper's "The Snail"](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/snail) and [Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Chambered Nautilus"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44379/the-chambered-nautilus) were important to my thinking about snails and shells, and some earlier drafts used lines from them instead.
> 
> Fun fact: the end of _Silver on the Tree_ is probably the fictional thing I have been most upset about the longest, possibly tied with "Meg Murry grew up to what now?". Runners-up include Emily burning her book, angels breaking up Lyra and Will, and Ged refusing to ever see Lebannen again.


End file.
